A tough time for fund raising?

You wouldn’t think so with CVC Capital Partners closing its third fund, the largest raised in Europe to date, at a whopping E4.65 billion.

Candover, with much more sober ambitions – a target of just E2.5 billion -, has had a first closing at E1.1 billion having only announced this spring that it was about to hit the fund raising trail. And there have been new fund launches too.See page 22 onwards.

New funds include one from Moore, Clayton & Co, the US-based financial advisory boutique, which has launched its first venture capital fund; Gensec, the South African investment bank, which has announced plans for an Irish stock exchange listed E50 million venture capital fund focusing on Irish and European IT companies; and Pentech, the new investment vehicle managed by Penta Capital, is looking to invest in early stage technology (predominantly software) companies with a GBP12 million to GBP20 million fund. The bulk of the monies raised here are from high net worth individuals, who are supporting a lot of tech investing in Scotland – see feature on page42 of this issue.

Admittedly fund raising time horizons are extending even for good propositions – Digital Networks has held an initial closing for its first fund, European Digital Infrastructure Fund I, at euro47.5 million, having set up towards the end of last year.

Schroder continues the trend for fund-of-funds launches this month with the imminent launch of its listed – destination and size unknown – vehicle, and Prime Edge, the first fund-of-funds vehicle structured as a CDO which taps the capital markets rather than private equity from institutional investors comes to market